Payback Time, you've gone soft on us

You dose the music section’s morning latte with Ex-Lax, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt and two tickets to a LiveNation club show of your choosing. Here’s this week’s winning whine.

Dear Payback Time: I really enjoy reading Payback Time. It’s great to see a moron be ripped to shreds in print. So when Dion Bellay writes in and displays his complete ignorance of the standard policy of only previewing or reviewing a concert, I fully expected the Georgia Straight’s editorial department to have a field day with this submission. So imagine my shock and disappointment when John Lucas went all pussycat soft on us. I was really looking forward to seeing this particular moron ripped to shreds in print. Too easy a target, perhaps?

> Erik Reid

John Lucas replies: Dearest Erik: I guess the real intent behind my response last week was lost on you: I couldn’t think of a more effective way to burn poor Dion than to dismiss his grievance right off the top and then spend the rest of the column rambling about something unrelated.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the tickets you’ve won. It’s going to be an amazing summer in Vancouver as far as concerts are concerned. One of the most exciting things, to me, is the chance to see Skrillex again. I say “see” and not “hear” because I’ve been legally deaf since the last time Sonny Moore descended upon the PNE Forum with his Rock’em Sock’em Robots music, back in October. The industrial-grade earplugs I bought for the occasion were useless against the nonstop barrage of aurally assaultive brostep. And some half-conscious teenager in a tutu and shredded fishnets attempted to kiss me. At least I think that’s what she was trying to do. It’s possible she was high on bath salts and was about to go all Causeway Cannibal on me. Whatever the case, she soon nodded off on the bleachers, and I was only too happy to relieve her of the $75 that fell out of her Hello Kitty purse. That almost covered the cost of parking in the PNE lot for three hours.

It was a weird night, but I can’t hold it against Skrillex. After all, the gut-hammering bass of “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” helped loosen up a bowel blockage that had been plaguing me for weeks. I’d like to thank Moore (who I have taken to calling “Skrill-Lax”) for that, only I wish the massive evacuation hadn’t happened while I was trying to do the Dougie. Next time I’ll be packing some Depends.